CeBIT impressions
by Volker Weber
"Did you see anything interesting?" - that's the common question you get when you meet someone at CeBIT. There is actually so much to see that you get a different answer depending whom you ask. Here are a few of my impressions:
- The first two days were more busy than last year. Beware however that last year CeBIT kicked of Wednesday and this year on Thursday. You won't see as many people Thu/Fri 2004 as Wed/Thu/Fri 2003.
- Sat/Sun will be busy as the free tickets now are valid Sat/Sun/Wed. Beware of packrats with big bags. :-)
- The busiest halls were 2 (SONY, JVC ...) and 26 (Nokia and other mobile phones).
- The CRT monitor is dead. The CRT TV might follow soon. Hold on to your money though. The prices will come down hard.
- IBM finally has a good on demand story: Bregenzer Festspiele scales from 60 people in the winter to 1600 in the summer. Clever architecture around clustered servers with a virtual server layer. Watch this space.
- Lots of interesting navigation systems. Magellan has a compelling handheld with a 20 gig disk.
- I like the Treo 600. Top spot on my wishlist. Palm people were surprised to learn I would dump the T3 for a Treo in a split second. Downsides: 160x160 screen, no BT.
- Markus Bregler has left palmOne on zero days notice less than two weeks ago. He is the #1 man in the PDA business in this country. Worked for Apple (Newton), USRobitics (Pilot), then 3com, Palm and finally palmOne. No information on his plans available. Watch this space.
- Gerald has a page on Heise Online, that looks like a blog, walks like blog, quacks like a blogs, so chances are it is a blog - although Gerald insists it isn't.
- Worst press conference award goes to Nokia for wasting 20 minutes on three models (m/f/f) parading their one and only new phone on stage.
- Evil scheduling award once again goes to Microsoft for scheduling yet another press conference for the same time slot that the IBM Software Group announced earlier. Apparently there were no real news in any of their press conferences though.
- vowe's best party award goes to palmOne.
